Design for Social Change
OUR CHANGE MODEL
- Creates the conditions for creative solutions to complex problems.
- Engages those with the greatest benefit for solving the problems as essential to creating effective solutions.
- Is an evolutionary and emergent process with clear steps. The most effective “end product or process” is not known from the start, but informed at each step.
- Combines design thinking, coaching, film for change, facilitation, and asset-based community development.
- Has achieved national endorsements and published outcomes for NHS and community partners to date.
Design for Social Change
Collaborative Process Creates the Conditions for Creative Solutions to Complex Problems
Phase 1. Define the problem
catalysts, challenges, & gaps, from multiple vantage points (i.e., data, commissioner, front-line staff and communities of interest)
1. Catalyst & Challenges
- Identify issues
- Known gaps
- Prior challenges
- Drivers for change
2. Gather Data
- Resources
- Information
- Contacts
- Connections
- Stories
3. Draft Concepts
- Identify themes
- Create initial concept
- Draft possible interventions
Phase 2. Connect & Redefine
initiate a common foundation for engagement to
re-define the problem & inform key opportunities for interventions
4. Connect
- Initial feedback groups
- Engage & Invite
- Listen
- Test content, contacts &
connections - Gain critical input
5. Redefine & Inform
- The essential issues and key opportunities
- Incorporate input
- Finalize themes, language,
interventions - Update key contacts
- Finalize approach
Phase 3. PRODUCE & Deliver
produce content (film, print, web) and context (campaign, event, workshop) for engagement & test with initial groups
6. Produce
- Story-led
- Film/Audio/Print
- Strategic Facilitation
- Resources for Roll-Out
7. Deliver
- Convene commissioners and community organizations together
- Share, facilitate, and engage with resources
- Actively engage feedback
Phase 4. EvaLUATE & ScALE
8. Evaluate
- Create metrics from the start
- Evaluate Resources
- Participant Feedback
- Impact measures (pre-post)
- Create informed feedback for roll-out
9. Scale
- Integrate feedback from groups
- Share resources via newly established & trusted networks
- Expand strategically and organically via alignment on
Issues, connections
& opportunities
DESIGN FOR SOCIAL CHANGE : CASE STUDIES
‘Conversations for Life’: how to talk about dying well for the living. Education resources and training for the public, heath & social care staff.
In partnership with Mary Matthiesen, I was part of creating an approach and community models to address a gap in education of both public and health care in the taboo subject of death and dying. The aim was to engage each in their role to affect future care outcomes.
Our dynamic and emergent design process identified challenges and developed models for social change. It included gathering and creating a board of stakeholders, researching verified data, filming individual and community stories of problems and mapping opportunities for impact. Stories created the catalyst for conversations between the different stakeholders, and all were invited to experience each other’s perspectives, share “aha” moments, consider, explore and co-create solutions to the problems they each experienced, informed by a specific process.
Rising to the challenge - Nourishing the Kids of Katrina
Using filmed stories strategically to influencing change. In 2005, I was at San Francisco Film School and worked as a production assistant with co-student, Robert Lee Grant. Robert had an idea to create a model to influence change, tackling diabetes and obesity in children in America. He did this by influencing local government to create edible school gardens based on the work of chef and advocate, Alice Waters.
The devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans left schools in need of rebuilding from the ground up. Grant’s vision was to use documentary film about the Edible School Gardens to gain support from influencers in the school district rebuilding programmes.
Get Hip to Good Food was an impactful project which later became the core of a bigger documentary ‘Nourishing the Kids of Katrina’, encouraging more schools to join in edible school garden programmes, and their influential effects on health and wellbeing.
THROUGH OUR EYES
Tackling inequities in health services.
Following the success of the Conversations for Life project, we were asked to develop a similar model to improve outcomes for communities who were experiencing inequities in health care services. ‘Through Our Eyes’ was another transformational project. It tackled and questioned the different outcomes between the BAME community and that of the White/British population with regards to accessing palliative care. All stakeholders for change were invited to a full-day facilitated event. Filmed stories were used as a catalyst to share real-world experiences, engage in cross-sector conversation, and explore and gain commitment to where changes could be made. Feedback was intentionally requested and recorded with the outcomes published in a Strategic Commissioning Report which set goals for implementation of change ideas. With the filmed resources and commissioning report in hand, commissioners, staff, and communities could continue raising awareness, sharing key messages, and measuring impact in their organizations across the region.
Where it all began - The Manchester Diabetes Centre
How the method and the puzzle came together.
My first experience was personal. As a patient with adult-onset Type 1 Diabetes, I had been complaining about how services were disconnected. I was working full time in media, which was demanding, and the disjointed nature of each of the services required in diabetes care meant lots of appointments and time away from work. I surmised that if all appointments could be in one place (basic services, blood draws, basic tests, updates of care), they could probably all be done in an hour, once every 3 months. This would benefit the patient and mean that doctors would not be required to refer to all the different services, across multiple sites, wasting time and money. If it could be done, it would be cost saving, time saving, and effective, including new patient education, all in one place!
